


Undertow

by filenotch



Series: Underneath [2]
Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2000-04-23
Updated: 2000-04-23
Packaged: 2017-11-04 05:15:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/390159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/filenotch/pseuds/filenotch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Duncan is in Shakespeare and Company, waiting for Methos, and Methos decides not to run.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Undertow

**Author's Note:**

> After "Forgive Us Our Sins." A rapprochement of sorts. My apologies to Ernest Hemingway.

I felt his Presence in a sudden rush, half a block from Shakespeare and Company. It spiked the back of my head with strange familiarity and a new pain that faded when I walked in the door. He looked up from where he leaned with a book against the shelves of the lending library. He almost smiled, but couldn't. I don't know how I knew that.

There had been a long silence between us after Bordeaux with only one tense interruption. I had no idea what brought him here now or what to say. I spoke cautiously, and as casually as I could. "Duncan MacLeod of the clan MacLeod. You'll have to pay a subscription like everyone else if you want to borrow that."

He only responded with the single, silent snort of laughter.

"What caught your fancy?" I asked, my curiosity genuine.

"Hemingway." He held up the spine for me to read. A Moveable Feast. "I'd thought this was where you got the name for the place, but this is the place, isn't it?"

"The very same."

MacLeod scanned the walls. The photos of writers remained, hung by Sylvia Beach back in Hemingway's day. I'd expanded the gallery a bit to keep it updated. Only that morning -- my first day back -- Pearl Buck, John Updike, and Robertson Davies had joined the older luminaries.

He looked back at the book in his hands and closed it slowly. "Did you know him?"

"Hemingway? Sure."

"When he wrote this, I mean."

I suppressed a flood of memories and answered the back of MacLeod's coat as he re-shelved the book. "No. I knew him then, though. He didn't write about it until forty years later."

"I know. I think he wrote about it when he needed to remember being happy."

"You knew him?" I asked, surprised.

MacLeod smiled a little. "Probably before you did." Then, with the all the air of boyish one-upmanship: "I'm in the book."

For some reason, it made perfect sense. "Let me guess, since I'm fairly certain you weren't Gertrude Stein. You were the friend they called Chink. Professional soldier."

He spread his arms and gave a little bow.

"Where did you get such a preposterous name?" The word preposterous is a good one for letting scorn into your voice. He ignored it. He knows how these games are played.

"Hadley, Hem's wife then. She called me that. She said only they knew the chink in my armor. They were good friends."

I watched his eyes suddenly lose focus as old moments replayed themselves. I waited, refusing to succumb to my own seductive memories of Paris in the 1920s. Instead I thought about how I could have told him I also knew where the chink was. In fact I had told him, and on any number of occasions. I was alive because he hadn't learned to patch the hole.

The conversation had been neutral so far, even easy. There'd been only that small jockeying for position typical of any encounter between males of the species. I was content for the moment to follow MacLeod's lead.

Duncan stood a few minutes more, perhaps reliving a mountain hike or an evening of wine and talk with the young writer and his wife. It seems we'd both known Hemingway before he was called Papa, before he ruined his marriage, and before he'd grown old enough to paint what Stein called the "Lost Generation" years -- a stupid phrase from an annoying woman -- in stark sepia tones. He wrote it well, though, the book itself a feast that moved between sentimental remembrances and the kind of brutal self-assessment that only comes with time.

Self-assessment. I could do that. I needed to do that in the face of this Presence. MacLeod. He chose that moment to blink and look up. I showed him nothing but wry inquiry, using the mask of obvious expression to hide true feeling -- an art perfected long ago.

"Sorry," he said, ignoring my invitation to share this memory as he had so many others. I would not have minded the distraction, but he did not give it to me.

"Quite all right," I said. "So what brings you here?"

"I came to see how you were." Still the note stayed light. No one listening could have guessed the subtext.

"Fine. Yourself?"

"I had dinner with Cassandra last month. Before..."

He trailed off, but I knew what he meant. Before Steven Keane had shown up. And they'd had more than dinner, by my guess. I said, "Ah," and paused a moment to let fade the things I hadn't said. "How is she?"

"She's well." He paused, and the silence could have been rich, but he did not give it the room. "She asked. About us."

"And you told her?"

"Nothing. I didn't need to. She guessed."

"Why are you telling me this?" I'd known he wasn't here for swords, and for company he had Amanda. I hoped he was here to make that most MacLeod of gestures for peace between us. He was fishing, though. I had no idea where this was going.

Suddenly it struck me, the thing I should have known from the beginning, and I kicked myself for inattention. It was my first day back in Paris after a few weeks away. It was no coincidence MacLeod was here. He'd had the shop watched.

Why? We were through. He'd made it plain enough in just those words when he threw me against the truck in Seacouver. If he let me live it was only through that chink of sentiment and chivalry.

"I thought you might like to know she seems to be healing."

Blind MacLeod, I thought. She won't heal from that time any more than I will. Maybe she'll learn, like I did, to simply live as if the Horsemen had never been. To think of healing those wounds was simple-minded at best.

"And you?" I asked, not entirely guarding my tone.

He heard something of my unspoken thoughts, and his answer bent my expectations. "I'll live," he said quietly.

"And so will I." I gave my defensive sarcasm free reign. "We live. Off we go. Here we are, living." I kept nothing from my voice. The easy conversation, the return to surface normalcy, that I would have liked. The old chapter could stay closed, and a new chapter could open where we intersect each others' stories briefly, and then only as nonhostile acquaintances. He had other ideas.

The problem was, so did I.

When I was sure he would want nothing further to do with me, it had been safe to keep a dead hope and pretend it lived.

"Live," he echoed softly, stepping toward me. "Grow stronger. Maybe --" He hesitated, body and voice, then carried through. "Love another day."

He stopped at the edge of too close. I closed my eyes and breathed in.

**Author's Note:**

> I believe right now if I could I would swallow you whole.  
> I would leave only bones and teeth  
> We could see what was underneath  
> And you would be free then.
> 
> I am friend to the undertow  
> I take you in, I don't let go...
> 
> Suzanne Vega


End file.
